Finding Asian American Disability History: Toward Sustainable Methods and Practices

Histories of Asian American disability have been strikingly under-studied. Although a new body of scholarship about Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) disability has emerged in literary criticism in the last decade or so, historical inquiries into the experiences of Asian Americans with disability have been hard to come by. Part of this delay may be explained by a relative lack of—or difficulty in identifying—primary sources about multiply marginalized populations. This scholarly gap has problematically perpetuated the “model minority” myth, as the absence of established scholarly methods and practices for discovering, and sustaining, Asian American disability history has rendered our historical inquiries almost exclusively focused on able-bodied Asian Americans. As a result, histories of Asian American activism and community-building have downplayed or ignored agencies and activisms generated by those who were physically or mentally disabled. By bringing papers together from literature and history, this panel begins to open both disciplinary and interdisciplinary lines of inquiry into the largely uncharted terrain of Asian American disability history.
Selena Moon’s paper directly engages the problem of disengagement with disability in Asian American history. As she aptly points out, disability history has centered white male experiences while marginalizing experiences of women of color. Conversely, Asian American history as a field has not paid sufficient attention to Asian Americans with disability, specifically Japanese Americans with physical or mental disabilities. By examining disabled Japanese Americans during and after the World War II and exploring the meanings of their boundary-breaking activism, Moon reminds us of the fundamental import of their stories in cultivating more broadly inclusive and relevant Asian American history.
Jonathan Hsy takes us to an earlier time by interrogating the poetry left by Chinese migrants on the walls of the barracks of the US Immigration Station on Angel Island between 1910 and 1940. Using a fresh interdisciplinary approach, he reconsiders the texts as specific kind of historical documents that recorded experiences of illness, disability, and collective care among the incarcerated. By seeing the space not only as a disabling-setting-turned-environmental-archive but also as a site that generated new vocabularies of disability, Hsy models an interdisciplinary literary-historical analysis that widens the horizon of APIDA disability history in terms of both methodology and practice.
Turning her eyes toward a more recent past, Alice Zhang considers a history at the intersection of disability and adoption. Based on the analysis of interviews that she conducted with Chinese adoptees with disabilities and their adoptive parents, Zhang delineates both the visibility and invisibility of disability with a careful attention to gender differences among adoptees. In so doing, she suggests new ways of thinking about the equation of undesirability and unadoptability, Chineseness in the “model minority” trope, and the formation of a kinship network and adoptee community. Zhang’s inquiry, made possible by the creation of new sources, that is, the oral history records, adds to the panel’s articulation of methods and practices for writing new history of Asian American disability.